Mouse clinics

The mouse clinics participating in INFRAFRONTIER all contributed to major European phenotyping projects such as the European Mouse Disease Clinic (EUMODIC) project, the first internationally coordinated large scale phenotyping effort, which produced and phenotyped 500 IKMC knockout mouse lines. One of the early phenotyping protocols utilized in EUMODIC was termed EMPReSSslim (http://empress.har.mrc.ac.uk/) and was developed by the EC funded EUMORPHIA project. The EUMODIC phenotypic data is available through the EuroPhenome database at (http://www.europhenome.org/). The major advances in the EUMORPHIA and EUMODIC projects were the harmonization of phenotyping experimental platforms through standardized protocols. Furthermore, SOPs and data analyses were continuously optimized to use the fewest number of animals possible, thereby contributing to the 3R concept. The phenotyping pipeline that will be used within INFRAFRONTIER-I3 builds on the EUMODIC pipeline and uses a cohort of seven female and seven male mutant mice for a comprehensive first-line phenotyping analysis.

The specific animal health and welfare policies as well as regulatory aspects used and followed by the participating mouse clinics are described in detail on their respective websites: